Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group projects $983,500 in savings annually and lifts borrower NPS with Argyle
Embedding direct-source income and employment verification at the front of the loan application has delivered measurable savings, higher borrower satisfaction, and stronger AUS outcomes.
Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group is an independent retail mortgage lender headquartered in Virginia Beach, Virginia, known for combining personalized service with a forward-looking approach to mortgage technology. As an nCino and Byte establishment with a multi-state lending footprint, Atlantic Bay has spent the past several years modernizing its origination workflow to deliver a faster, more transparent home buying experience.
Challenge
Three forces converged to push Atlantic Bay to rethink how it verified income and employment.
The first was the direction signaled by the agencies. As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to invest in their consumer-permissioned data roadmaps, Atlantic Bay leadership saw a clear opportunity to align.
“I’m a big fan of swimming with the current, not against the current. The more Fannie and Freddie talked about it, the more I realized we needed to be on this boat. If we don’t, we’re going to fall behind,” said John Wines, Chief Strategy Officer of Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group.
The second was cost. Verification invoices climbed month after month with no signs of slowing, putting pressure on margins and forcing the team to look for alternatives.
“The astronomical costs of verification that we were paying out every single month just kept growing and growing. We needed to find alternative ways to do it.”
The third was borrower experience. Wines, a former originator, watched borrowers navigate a paperwork-heavy mortgage process that felt out of step with every other financial experience in their lives. Applying for a credit card or a car loan is instant. Applying for a mortgage still meant digging through filing cabinets for pay stubs and W-2s.
“Nobody really prepares you for the fact that buying your first home is a lot of paperwork. That isn’t in line with the other borrowing experiences people have today, and borrowers are going to expect more. We wanted to get ahead of that.”
Solution
After evaluating consumer-permissioned verification providers against a detailed list of requirements covering employer coverage, refresh capabilities, cost, and integration depth with nCino and Byte, Atlantic Bay selected Argyle for income and employment verification.
“We literally built an Excel spreadsheet of every criterion that mattered to us and stacked the providers against it. Argyle landed on top, especially for income validation.”
The bigger debate inside Atlantic Bay was where to place Argyle in the workflow. Wines was initially the team’s most vocal skeptic about embedding Argyle directly in the loan application, worried that adding a step could increase abandonment. But the numbers pointed the other way. Loan officers were already emailing the verifications desk after pre-qualification to order manual VOIEs at a far higher per-loan cost than running Argyle at the front of the application.
“I wrestled with this for a long time. Big credit goes to Chrissy Brown, our COO, and Julie on our team. They were passionate about putting it in the loan app from day one, and it’s been a huge success.”
Atlantic Bay built a custom loan application in nCino with tailored language designed to encourage borrowers to connect their payroll accounts, while preserving the option to enter information manually. The rollout was paired with deep internal enablement:
- Operations training so underwriters trusted accepted income decisions from direct deposit data and stopped over-conditioning for redundant documentation.
- Walkthroughs of the borrower experience so loan officers knew exactly what their clients would see inside Argyle Link.
- Updated origination scripts that primed borrowers to have payroll and bank credentials handy before starting the application.
- A branched workflow for borrowers with less than two years of employment history, routing them into manual entry while connected borrowers stayed in the streamlined path.
To reinforce adoption with the sales team, Atlantic Bay leadership made a habit of surfacing wins in real time. Wines regularly flagged individual loans where borrower connection had unlocked an approved eligible decision in Desktop Underwriter, often because Argyle surfaced rental payment history from direct deposits that flipped a refer into an approve.
“If I see a loan that flipped, I go tell the loan officer, ‘Hey, that loan you had with the 580 credit score and the 49% DTI? You got approve-eligible because your borrower connected their assets and we found a rental payment history.’ Celebrating those wins really got adoption moving on the sales side.”
Outcome
Embedding Argyle at the front of the loan application in the POS has produced measurable wins across cost, borrower experience, and loan quality.
Estimated $983,500 in annualized verification cost savings*
By making Argyle the primary path for income and employment verification, Atlantic Bay avoided routing borrowers to more expensive legacy tools whenever a direct payroll connection wasn’t available. From January through March, the lender estimates it saved $245,875 using Argyle instead of more expensive verification options. Annualized, that pace projects to $983,500 in full-year savings, and Wines expects the actual total to land even higher as origination volume builds through the back half of the year.
“We saved a quarter of that number in just the first three months of the year. When you annualize it and factor in stronger quarters ahead, you’re looking at over a million dollars a year in savings, on top of the efficiency gains, rep and warrant relief, and everything else.”
*Savings figures are based on Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group’s internal analysis comparing estimated verification costs from January–March 2026 using Argyle versus prior verification methods. Annualized savings figures are projections based on current adoption and loan volume trends and may vary over time.
+1 point NPS improvement on Argyle-connected loans
One of the biggest internal debates was whether asking borrowers to connect their accounts would hurt satisfaction. Atlantic Bay already had a strong Net Promoter Score, and any drop would have given holdouts a reason to push back. The data showed the opposite. NPS came in one point higher on loans where the borrower connected through Argyle than on loans where they did not.
“We were able to go back to the sales team and say, your borrowers are not upset with this experience.
If you’re hesitant, that’s a you thing, not a borrower thing.”
Stronger AUS outcomes and more reliable rep and warrant relief
Argyle's direct-source data has helped Atlantic Bay capture relief on AUS runs more consistently, flipping borderline loans into approve-eligible. Refreshable reports have also removed the friction of pre-close updates, eliminating the need to chase borrowers for new pay stubs when documents go stale.
“There’s nothing worse than going back to a borrower for a new pay stub or bank statement. Now we can just refresh the reports. The savings and efficiencies make it a no-brainer.”
A modernized borrower experience and broad LO buy-in
What began with operations and underwriting champions has become the company-wide standard. Loan officers who were initially skeptical now actively highlight borrower wins, and Atlantic Bay’s production teams use the modernized workflow as a competitive advantage in the market.
“How much cooler is that for a borrower, that they didn’t have to dig out pay stubs and W-2s? It really paints the picture that we have modernized the loan process. It’s not the old school back and forth.”
By embedding Argyle at the very front of the borrower journey and pairing it with strong internal enablement, Atlantic Bay has built a verification model that is faster, cheaper, and more reliable. That foundation positions the lender to grow volume without proportionally growing headcount, the kind of efficiency today’s mortgage market demands.
“We’re not looking to stand still on volume. We’re looking to grow aggressively over the next several years. If we can do that with a similar headcount and a lot more efficiency, we all win.”
Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group, L.L.C. NMLS #72043 (nmlsconsumeraccess.org) is an Equal Opportunity Lender.
